


ancestry

by starlightwalking



Category: The Lord of the Rings - All Media Types, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Gen, Implied Galadriel | Artanis/Lúthien Tinúviel, Inspired By Tumblr, POV Second Person, Tolkien Gen Week 2020, proper nouns are for losers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-06
Updated: 2020-07-06
Packaged: 2021-03-04 23:34:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 807
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25104784
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starlightwalking/pseuds/starlightwalking
Summary: You wear an ancestor’s face.
Relationships: Arwen Undómiel & Lúthien Tinúviel
Comments: 16
Kudos: 46
Collections: Tolkien Gen Week 2020





	ancestry

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ragesyndrome](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ragesyndrome/gifts).



> For [Tolkien Gen Week](http://tolkiengenweek.tumblr.com/) 2020, Day 1: Family.
> 
> Inspired by [this tumblr post](https://arofili.tumblr.com/post/615536255338479616/htmlfroggy-im-washing-me-and-my-ancestors) \+ a conversation with ragesyndrome / [@bagginshield](http://bagginshield.tumblr.com/) <3
> 
> This [disregards](https://arofili.tumblr.com/post/621945239719034880/tolkien-really-missed-out-on-having-arwen-live) Valian Years being longer than Sun Years, because trying to figure out that math makes my brain hurt.

You wear an ancestor's face. Your smile has never been your own. Your name is a memory of her song, echoing through the ages she did not endure to see. You are but a shadow of her beauty, yet your glance strikes awe in the hearts of those who knew her.

You will never know her.

She is gone, freed from the circles of the world. There are whispers that you are her spirit born again, but you think you would know if this were not your first journey upon this earth.

You gather the evening around you like a cloak. Your father's mother once shed her skin and took up wings, trading one body for another. She freed herself from the twilight of her own father's mother. You do not have this luxury, nor would you pay the price for such a choice.

Your son's daughter, when she is born, will break this pattern, you hope. You pray. Let her be free of this weight.

You are called the evening star. Your father's father bears the bloodstained jewel whose name you carry. When you were a girl you would watch for the star to rise and dance beneath it, singing its name and yours. _Undómiel, Gil-Estel._

You do not dance so freely now. Not when it is her footsteps you would trace, her doom you would follow. Her hope, your Estel, you would choose.

Your mother's father is the only one who can look you in the eye when you ask, _What was she like?_ Close enough to know, not too close to still mourn all these ages later. He answers: _Starlight. Birdsong. Flowers in bloom._ You do not understand, but you accept his words. No one else will speak of her, even in metaphor.

Already you live longer than she ever could, yet young and fair and unripe in your love. Is this the grey world she made for you? Is this the future to which she left you heir?

Your mirror breaks. In it you see your sisters, your cousins. Your father's brother and his line, down through the centuries, girls and women breathing and loving and losing and dying in spans of time you would deem hardly long enough to learn a single melody. Not if you are to impress your father, stolen son of the gold-cleaver himself.

They watch you, these women. Every fragment reflects back in on itself, blurring until you see only your own face. But it is not your face, nor theirs: it is _hers_ , the ancestress you share, overshadowing your twilit life.

Your mother's mother knew her, once: held her close, loved her, wept for her passing. But it is through your father's line you trace your lineage, not your mother's; she left your mother's mother alone in the lands that sank beneath the sea with the weight of a continental grief.

You visit her lands, this grandmother of yours, called like you after a ghost of what once was: a golden wood no more than a memory of a dream-garden, an evening star no more than a glimmer of a truer dusk. In her eyes you glean the long-since scattered spark of elder days; in her mirror-basin you peer deep into the past.

You see your reflection in starlit ripples, but it is _she_ looks back at you, her image wavering so you cannot see if she weeps or smiles. She lies beneath the surface, just out of reach, but you swear she sees you through the mists of death and time.

You do not tell your mother's mother this. She has lost her love once; she need not lose you, too. Not yet.

Are you doomed to her doom? Are you fated to her fate? When your Estel falls to earth in a rain of stardust and calls you by her name, do you surrender to the same sundering she embraced?

Or do you craft yourself into your own woman, hold back the tide of destiny that would sweep you away? Do you wash your spirit clean of her, wash your ancestors away?

No matter what you do she will remain, the shadow at your heels, the smile on your lips, the darkness in your eyes. You wear an ancestor's face. You walk an ancestor's path.

You wonder, sometimes, if you haunted her as she haunts you, if she felt your inevitable life flicker in her womb before she even knew the man for whom she would die a death eternal. If you were her future, her past, her present just as she is yours.

You are twined together in song, harmony blending into melody, choice into fate. Do you sing with her? Do you match her cadence? Do you follow her rhythm?

Or do you abandon your avowed ancestry, and dance a discord against death?

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to the Silmarillion Discord, especially JazTheBard, for help on the wording of that last sentence :)
> 
> Thanks for reading, and please comment if you enjoyed!  
> You can find me on tumblr [@arofili](http://arofili.tumblr.com/), and check out the [Tolkien Gen Week](http://tolkiengenweek.tumblr.com/) blog too!


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